Experimental Archaeologists Test Past by Making It Real

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Experimental Archaeologists Test Past by Making It Real

Of all the scientific disciplines, archaeology lends itself most to the imagination. It's the scholarly embodiment of the impulse to imagine oneself as a Mongol raider or Roman slave, tracking gazelle across the Great Rift Valley or navigating by stars across the Pacific.
For a few lucky researchers, these dreams become hypotheses. Experimental archaeologists test ancient tools and techniques, determining how they worked and whether modern interpretations are correct. Sometimes the studies look more like play than research — but why shouldn't research be fun?
From ancient noodle recipes to spear throwing, here are a few of our favorite studies.

Kon-Tiki

In the annals of experimental archaeology, no experiment is more famous than a 4,300 mile trip taken by six men in a raft called the Kon-Tiki. Led by Norwegian adventurer Thor Heyerdahl, the voyage was supposed to show that pre-Columbian South Americans could have reached the South Pacific by floating across on rafts made of balsa wood.
Heyerdahl's journey was memorialized in a bestselling book and Academy Award-winning documentary, but the settlement hypothesis was discredited by further anthropological research. In June of this year, however, genetic tests of Polynesian islanders identified scattered DNA markers typically found among South Americans. Maybe a few ancient sailors indeed made the Kon-Tiki's epic voyage.
Image: Associated Press

First Musical Instrument

Not long after the first figurative carvings appear in the archaeological record about 35,000 years ago, so do the first musical instruments. Some scientists say these cultural advances mark the birth of truly modern humans.
LISTEN: The First Flute__[dewplayer:http://stag-komodo.wired.com/images_blogs/wiredscience/2011/07/original_flutesound.mp3]__The first instruments, found in caves in southern Germany, were flutes made from the bones of swans. Replicas hint at what our ancestors heard.
Image: Nicholas Conard/NatureAudio: Wulf Hein/Tubingen University

Original Noodles

Processed foods might have a bad name these days, but they're one of humanity's great inventions: nutrition in portable, long-lasting form.
The oldest known noodles were found inside a 4,000 year-old pot excavated from Lajia, a flood-buried village located in China's upper Yellow River basin. Chemical tests of the yellow, 20 inch-long strands couldn't determine their composition, but traces of millet were found in surrounding sediments. Researchers declared that humanity's first noodles were made from millet.
But Chinese archaeologist Zhengyao Yin had doubts: Millet doesn't contain gluten, which gives dough its elasticity. When Yin and his colleagues tried making noodles from millet varieties still found around Lajia, the dough proved gritty, brittle and unsuitable for the task. The first noodle recipe remains unknown.
*Top image: Zhengyao Yin/*Archaeometry. Right: K.B.K. Teo, E. Minoux et al.

Walk Like an Egyptian

In 1881, British Museum archaeologist Greville Chester purchased a 2,600 year-old artificial toe recovered from an Egyptian tomb. Another such toe, several hundred years older, was found in 2000 in the tomb of an Egyptian priest. Made from wood and showing signs of wear around the edges, they appeared to be the first known prosthetics. It was also possible, however, that Egyptian embalmers used the toes to restore physical completeness in people headed to the afterlife with deformed feet.
To test whether the toes could have worked as prostheses, University of Manchester researcher Jacqueline Finch recruited the help of two people whose big toes had been lost. They were fitted with replicas. In February, Finch reported in The Lancet that the Egyptian toes could have handled the stresses of walkingImage: J.L. Finch/Egyptian Museum

Stone Age Weapons Tech

In the final millenniums of the Stone Age, from roughly 40,000 years ago to the advent of agriculture 10,000 years ago, people became very sophisticated at making weapons.
Spearheads found in what is now France weren't just made from pieces of bone or stone, but antler tips inlaid with rows of tiny flint blades. To see how these worked, French archaeologists made copies, mounted them on wooden shafts and hurled them at deer carcasses. Spears with serrated heads penetrated twice as far, hinting at a development that 40,000 years ago was truly revolutionary.
Image: E. Demoulin/Journal of Archaeological Science

A Stone Age Without Stone

Stone tools became steadily more sophisticated as the Stone Age progressed, but not in southeast Asia. Stone tools there remained relatively primitive, lacking the innovation and diversity seen in other regions.
One explanation for this aberration is that southeast Asia was a cultural backwater, geographically isolated from developments elsewhere. Another is the so-called bamboo hypothesis, which holds that only a few simple flakes of stone were needed to carve complex tools from bamboo.
To test whether this was possible, University of Exeter archaeology student Metin Eren, who in other research has tested Neanderthal tools, tried his hand at shaping bamboo with stones from a river in southeast China. The first attempts ended with Eren's group seeking help from a local farmer, but soon they learned to make sharp bamboo knives.
Image: Metin Eren/Quaternary International

The First Tools? Not Quite

Late in 2010, paleontologists reported finding 3.5 million year-old animal bones scarred by stone scrape marks. If their interpretation was correct, it would move back the date on hominid tool use by almost one million years, into the time of Lucy and Australopithecus afarensis. It would also refute the notion that eating meat fueled the evolution of large, modern human brains.
The marks were hard to see, however, and some anthropologists were skeptical. In a March Journal of Archaeological Science study, researchers used sharp rocks to scrape flesh from the bones of chicken and sheep. The resulting marks looked little like those found on the 3.5 million year-old bones, which are now suspected to be have been caused by natural weathering.
Image: Examples of cut marks produced by experimental removal of flesh from chicken and sheep bones. (Manuel Domínguez-Rodrigo /Journal of Archaeological Science)

Life in a Sami Hut

To survive in the icy Arctic, where temperatures stay below zero degrees Fahrenheit for months on end, the nomadic Sami people of northern Scandinavia traditionally heated tiny huts with fires made from birch wood.
To understand what that was like, Swedish archaeologist Lars Liedgren built a traditional hut and lived inside, burning only what he could cut with a replica Viking hand-axe and transport by sled.
A few hours of cutting provided enough fuel to keep the air comparatively balmy a day and a night. The smoke was annoying at first, wrote Liedgren in the Journal of Archaeological Science, but air inside ancient Sami huts would have met federal United States standards of indoor air quality.
Image: Journal of Archaeological Science

A Viking Voyage

After the recovery of a 100 foot-long Viking warship in 1957, it was only a matter of time before somebody built a replica and sailed it. This was done to great publicity in 2007, when 65 men and women piloted a reconstruction on a 1,000 mile voyage from Denmark to Dublin, Ireland.
The ostensible purpose of the trip was a scientific investigation into Viking seafaring, but it was as much a voyage of imagination: What was it like to cross the ferocious North Sea in a longboat? Would modern people be tough enough?
The crew arrived safely, crossing the sea in seven weeks. Unlike the Vikings, they were greeted by cheering crowds.
Image: William Murphy/Flickr